


Lukewarm

by valkyrienix



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Flashbacks, M/M, suicide talk, this is just a bunch of sads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-14 12:06:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2191206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyrienix/pseuds/valkyrienix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a somewhat warm feeling, you’ve come to think, because it’s an emotion so strong you can’t call it cold or icy, but it’s not really warm enough to instill any form of happiness.  Warm emotions are happy, joyous even.  Grief isn’t that.  There’s cold in it.  Enough cold to make someone have that empty cave in the center of their chest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lukewarm

You don’t remember any of your last thoughts before you died. Just relief. Release. You didn’t have a single regret, and for that you think you’re the most selfish person you’ve had the indecency to know. But you couldn’t handle it anymore. You couldn’t take another moment, carrying the weight of his death on your shoulders. The feeling is clear as bell in your memory, like you’d had a thousand bombs on your back, ticking away, each a good fifty pounds. A thousand replicas of the weapon that killed him. Killed Rick. It was too much for you to handle. So you’d ended it. Simple as that. You’d taken that knife, the one your dad had given to you, and you’d used it. Put it to work. It had hurt, you think, but at some point you remember there being numbness and the eventual darkness.

It was almost like you had blinked. One moment you were in the den, and the next you were opening your eyes in a box. There wasn’t any form of an interim. You hadn’t even really been able to enjoy being dead, really. Not that it mattered. You didn’t really think much before the medication. You’d felt, certainly. Hunger, eagerness, desire. Comradery, even. You’d forgotten that Rick was even a thing.

When you’d come to, in the treatment center, the memories had come back, little by little, slowly but surely, and it felt like your chest was being torn to pieces all over again. Your wrists had ached, your head was in agony, but you couldn’t bring yourself to cry. Your roommate, Alex, hadn’t been much help. He’d called you soft. Still, he’d sat there with you, helped you endure it, let you grip his clothing as tight as you could manage. Allowed you to come to terms with your death, and ultimately, your rebirth.

No, you don’t regret your suicide. You don’t regret that it brought you to where you are now. You wonder how you would have lived your life if you hadn’t done it. The thought rolls in your mind as you stand before your dad, listening to him, egging him on. As you _beg_ him to yell at you for your inconsideration of your family’s feelings. You were wrong to do it the way you did, but you don’t regret where it’s brought you now.

Today, you’ve relived the past, and today, you can feel the creepings of the old guilt, the old despair and emptiness as they crawl begin their trek onto your shoulders. You’d almost felt them completely, earlier, when you’d first seen him, lying there in front of your home. Limp. Lifeless. It was almost twenty times worse, actually. You hadn’t been there when he’d died the first time. You’d never seen his body. You’d just known he was gone. You’d known he was gone and that it was your fault for inadvertently pushing him into the military. But you hadn’t witnessed the evidence.

You didn’t have a first thought when you’d spotted him. It was more of an emotion, like a gun had gone off and the ricocheting sound of shot, that instant of pure noise and thunder, was your feeling of terror. Fear had coursed through your body, unstoppable, reanimating your old nerve endings to full life for the briefest of moments while you, unlike the bullet, walked forward as if in slow motion. 

In the end, you were not comforted, and your fear was recognized as truth. You took his shoulder with your hand, barely feeling the fabric with your lifeless fingers, and shook him. You shook him so slightly. So slight, in fact, you don’t think it classifies as a shaking. His head had fallen forward, those eyes that you had been trying to meet with your own, the _truly_ lifeless ones, had disappeared from your line of sight as his head had bobbed forward to reveal the knife sticking out of the back of his head.

Fear had been immediately replaced with disbelief, and following that milliseconds later, the lukewarm feeling of grief. Or something akin to it. It wasn’t quite grief, because the devotion and the love you’d felt for him had come to a peak. Never had you felt it so strongly as you had in that moment.

You’d smoothed his hair, shaking, and closed his eyes for him. By then, you think you’d started trembling as your emotions had slowly gotten the better of you. It’s then that an anger had presented itself. Not a wrath, no, just an anger. A piping hot oven filled with it. Why? What could Rick have ever done to deserve this from someone whom he’d loved and respected his whole life? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even remotely within what was categorized as fair. He’d been given a second chance at life, and it had been swiped away from him before he’d gotten a chance to really take it by the reins and direct it down the path _he’d_ wanted to follow.

So you’d taken the knife.

You’d taken it, and you’d gone to face the man you’d never quite had the courage to face before. But first, before your fingers had wrapped around the hilt, you’d leaned forward, and whispered in his ear, one last time, one last uttering of the words the two of you had held close to each other since the middle of secondary school:

_“Rick and Ren forever.”_

**Author's Note:**

> wh o op s


End file.
